Frumious Wombat writes: Harvard Business Review has online a case study of a fictional healthcare provider, spread across multiple sites, attempting to integrate their IT systems and medical best practices. Four real-world experts, including the CEO of Kaiser-Permanente weigh in on whether the (fictional company's ) approach is viable. The question: is Healthcare IT different from other enterprise IT?

Frumious Wombat writes: Green tea is supposed to be good for you, but the antioxidants are available in such low quantities why has been a mystery. Now a team of researchers at Autonomous University of Barcelona have used high-level computational studies to demonstrate the antioxidants make complexes which enhance quantum-mechanical tunneling, thereby speeding the reaction enough to compete with damaging peroxide-radical reactions.

Frumious Wombat writes: A team of engineers have set a small robot climbing walls in order to compare how natural and artificial snail slimes work. Co-worker Randy Ewoldt, of MIT, said: "An important result is that snail mucus per se is not required for robots to climb walls. We can make our own adhesive locomotion material with commercial products (instead) of harvesting slime from a snail farm." The real article is here for the technically (or gastropodically) inclined.

Frumious Wombat writes: It has been known that hallucinogens react with the 5HT2a serotonin receptor, but so do other drugs which don't cause hallucinations. Now, researchers have discovered that the 5HT2a receptor is capable of multiple signaling pathways, even when confronted with very similar drugs, similar to a multi-polar switch. Both drugs control phospholipase C pathways, but only hallucinogens also activate the Pertussis toxin-sensitive heterotrimeric Gi/o proteins and Src.

"Cobol remains the most widely deployed programming language in big business, accounting for 75% of all computer transactions — and it is not going to go away. Cobol is pervasive in the financial sector (accounting for 90% of all financial transactions), in defence, as well as within established manufacturing and insurance sectors. We estimate that there are over 200 billion lines of Cobol in production today, and this number continues to grow by between three and five percent a year."
Gary Barnett, Research Director
OVUM

So, for all the time spent arguing the merits of Ruby vs. C# vs. today's MFTL, should the community spend more time building tools to make COBOL livable? Or should we institute a digital spay/neuter programme and do something about that alleged 3-5% growth?

Frumious Wombat writes: Forbes is after Stallman again. In their October 30th issue (only available to registered users on their web-page), they present "Toppling Linux", about how Stallman's insistence on GPL-3 anti-DRM language could split Linux and turn its market over to Microsoft and Sun. From the article, "IT managers want to buy stuff that puts them at as little risk as possible. If there was a risk that Stallman could become such a loose cannon, that's something most IT maangers would have wanted to know before they bet their companies on Linux." Forbes also seems a little miffed that billion-dollar tech-companies tread so lightly in his presence.